The Killing Fields Memories of Cambodia

I hope my readers won’t weary of this series of blogs on Cambodia just yet. I’d like to share a few pictures about the memory of the “killing fields”: memories Cambodians live with. From the time the US armed forces pulled out of Vietnam in 1975, to about 1979, there was a great turmoil in Cambodia. A radically Marxist group called the Khmer Rouge (Red Khmer) took over after overthrowing the Lon Nol government that was US supported. The Khmer Rouge were led by a man named “Pol Pot”, also known ironically as “Brother Number One.” He drove the intellectuals and management-business class from the capital city (“everyone who wore glasses”) calling them parasites and insisting that they do real work—-raising rice. His regime tortured and killed an estimated one million people in the space of a few years. Here are some photos of the high school, Tuol Seng, that was used for torture and of the torture-burial ground called the killing field. Ironically, these are a couple of the primary tourist attractions of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia.